How many times have you been told never to write your passwords down? What if your passwords never had to leave your brain — ever? A team at the University of California at Berkeley may have found a way to make “pass-thoughts” commercially accepted.

Pass-thoughts are thoughts that a headset records through brainwaves. The computer learns what your individual brainwaves are like and then identifies you. Traditionally, these brainwaves, called electroencephalograms (EEGs), are collected through expensive and sometimes invasive devices, so the pass-thought growth has been severely stunted.

“No one wants to install invasive probes under their skull every time they check their email!” Berkeley’s school of information said in a blog post.

But professor John Chuang found that using new and less powerful EEG-reading devices could make the process much easier — and more adoptable. Chuang and his team started experimenting with the Neurosky MindSet, an EEG reader that looks like a normal Bluetooth device and can connect to a computer wirelessly. It costs around $100. The headset only measures a “single-channel EEG signal,” that of your left brain. The team was worried that this signal wouldn’t be strong enough for the computer to learn an individual’s brainwave patterns, but as it turns out, it works.

Though $100 might be steep for some, this might be one of the more promising uses of biometrics in authentication simply because it doesn’t require very expensive technology that you might see in retina scanning.

In order for the computer to learn your signals, you must think of one pass-thought for your account. In its tests, the team asked groups to think about moving their fingers up and down, singing a specific song, and acting out a sporting activity such as swinging a golf club. Participants were also asked to choose a color and then count objects of that color in a provided video. The team found that people were more willing to use the pass-thoughts system when they enjoyed the thought they had to repeat for their “password.” Most enjoyed counting colored objects and singing a specific song.

Kid idea image via Shutterstock

“You can listen more carefully to what’s going on inside the brain, understand the relationship between brain activity and emotions and gain more control over your emotional state,” Garten explains.

An EEG measures electrical activity in the brain by detecting it via contacts on the scalp. As a medical instrument it has long been used to diagnose conditions like epilepsy and dementia as well as determining whether a patient in a coma is brain dead. Brain electrical activity is cyclic in nature, hence the name brainwave. Waves within particular ranges of frequencies, like “alpha” or “beta” waves, have various types of biological significance.

“Beta waves are associated with focus and alpha waves when you are relaxed and calm or quiet the mind,” says Garten. Beta waves are emitted when people are alert, agitated, tense or afraid and have frequencies ranging from 13 to 60 pulses per second in the Hertz scale. When relaxed, the frequency slows down to 7-13 pulses per second, so called “alpha waves”. We spend most of our time in beta mode, but the alpha rhythm is ideal for learning and performing complex tasks. Decreasing the brain rhythm using techniques like meditation and mindfulness also produces significant increases in the levels of beta-endorphins and dopamine.

“This is still first stage technology so what we can detect is still quite limited but the very fact that we can detect it is pretty damn exciting, ” enthuses Garten. “The predominant thing we can detect is alpha waves and beta waves.” The Muse headband measures full brainwave spectrum data from four points on the scalp: the temples and behind the ears. The integrated Brain Health system suggests and runs you through a series of mindfulness-based exercises such as deep breathing suitable for your current brainwave state. “

“Meditators can have a higher resting alpha state. When you are meditating there are a number of brain changes which go on and over time those become persistent so people are able to maintain this calm state of mind. “

At the LeWeb conference in Paris, Garten demonstrated the headband by adding contextual information based on brain activity to an email. “When someone is focussed the characters are small and tight and as they dream or relax or start to laugh the letters have florishes. When you are adding emphasis to something, you are smiling or using a lot of facial movement (which Muse can detect), we make the text bigger.”

Interaxon is certainly not the only player in this space. Neurosky makes an EEG chipset for integration into other devices as well as producing EEG devices which cost around $200. Emotiv has produced a more sophisticated 16-sensor headset which can detect some emotions and thought patterns but it’s a rather more steep $750. Both applications seem to emphasise applications where you directly control things with your brain such as a computer interface.

“We can do really basic controls – one dimension – based on alpha waves and beta waves. When you focus on something it will happen. If there’s a glowing ball in your game and you focus on it (to go into a beta state), it can get bigger, ” says Garten. However, Muse’s objective seems more inner exploration than external control.  As the Buddha said “It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you.”

Muse can be pre-ordered on crowd-sourcing site IndieGogo where the project has already raised $253,293.

For secrets, nowhere’s safer than the inside of your head, right? Wrong. Commercially sold electrode-headsets, often used in gaming, can be hacked to extract your ATM PIN, birthday month, location, and more, according to Wired.

It’s a whole new era of phishing attacks. Instead of tricking you into giving up sensitive information with convincing e-mails, hackers could tap into your gaming headsets and pull the information out of your brainwaves that are converted into data streams.

The headset in question is the Emotiv EPOC headset, which is used for a number of computer interaction purposes, including gaming. It taps into the player’s brain waves to control what’s happening on the screen via a set of electrodes that sit on the top of your forehead when in use. The software collects your thoughts and translates them into data that can be extracted using an application programming interface, or API.

A new paper called “On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces” shows how the attack is performed. The research team got a hold of the brainwave data stream using the API and performed five experiments to see if they could gather a PIN number, bank account information, location information, month of birth, and facial-recognition information.

Each experiment flashed a sequence of pictures on a computer screen. For example, when trying to extract bank account information, test subjects saw pictures of ATM machines and debit cards. In the PIN test, they were shown a series of numbers.

The researchers then studied the “event-related potential,” or the electrical change in the brain that, in this case, signals that the subject recognizes or has a connection to what they’ve just seen on the screen.

For the PIN test, debit cards, and ATM machines researchers correctly guessed the sensitive information for 20 percent of the victims on the first try. For the bank based on the ATM, as well as the location of their homes, researchers correctly guessed for 30 percent of the test subjects. The most successful test was the month of birth, which researcher pinned down correctly for 60 percent of the subjects.

The scariest part of this isn’t necessarily that the brainwaves give up this kind of information, but the fact that it’s available in an API form that is currently accessible by anyone. The Emotiv EPOC headset allows any developer to create apps based on that API, which researchers say could lead to “brain spyware.” Indeed, many of these apps include a bit of “calibration” or regular installation that could be used to show victims these kinds of pictures and steal the brainwave data.

Check out the research report below:

via Wired, Image via Emotiv

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